While physicists dash off to romantic Italian islands or cosmopolitan European cities or exotic Asian locales to talk about their particles and cosmology, I am going to Baltimore, Maryland for a conference this weekend. The conference is Ecumenicon 2006 and I will be doing art presentations there. This conference, as advertised, has been going on in one form or another for twenty years, and I have an Ecumenicon T-shirt that is about 15 years old. (I'm not sure I still fit into it, though.) I have been going to these events for quite a while, selling art and giving talks.

Ecumenicon is somewhat mis-named, because the "ecumenical" quality of the conference extends mostly to different types of neo-paganism or other esoteric spiritualities. At times, Christians, Jews, or Buddhists have shown up, but few of them are "mainstream" representatives of their faiths. In this way it doesn't resemble a physics conference at all, except perhaps one on string theory. However, I expect to talk about science and mathematics when I'm there, and hope to be on a panel discussion about science, fundamentalism, and neo-paganism.

I'm not a Neo-Pagan, but I know a large number of them and have learned about this multivariant "new religious movement" over the years. One thing which interests me is that as far as I know, Neo-Paganism has no complaints about evolution and embraces a scientific world-view along with its fondness for Goddesses and Celtic mythology. In fact, I even know some Pagan scientists. They seem to resolve the contradictions of belief and research by acknowledging that different forms of knowledge and experience take place on different levels of reality. This multi-level reality is a world-view that I also share, and I'll be talking about it in the future. I don't think that the physicists at those high-energy conferences worry about that. Their "multiple worlds" are in theory only, and will never be directly experienced. Nor does Neo-Paganism ever cross those busy physicist minds. In a way, the atheist scientists have it easier; they don't have to concern themselves with any other reality than the material one we all seem to inhabit. I hope to ask the Pagans some questions.

Posted at 3:00 am | link